Speaker - September 2011

LIVING ON THE

He’s bold and brash. Colorful and controversial. Opinionated and unafraid …
He’s a rough-and-tumble
Philadelphian to the core. He’s arrogant.
He’s confident. He’s loud, but what he
says matters and makes sense.

It’s true. He’s all of that and more.

But mostly, Jeffrey Gitomer, CSP, CPAE, is very successful.

And no matter what you may think about him—whether you think he pushes the envelope too far, or is just a bit too quick to share his opinion, or maybe a little too free-spirited for his own good—you have to give Gitomer credit. For all of his quirks, he has managed to build his career—a Hall-of-Fame-quality career—completely on his own terms and filled with more heart than most will ever know. Gitomer is one of a kind—a speaker, author, blogger and columnist who has built a multimedia and social media empire based not only on a fairly straightforward sales idea (“People don’t like to be sold, but they do like to buy.”), but also on his entirely original, entirely unvarnished personality.

Gitomer doesn’t do political correctness. He’s not one for excuses. To be honest, he’s not particularly interested in “customer satisfaction” in the way he describes it, though ironically, his customers are very satisfied with his results. Gitomer preaches customer loyalty.

Gitomer is all about results. He wants to win. He wants to help his clients win. That’s what he cares about.

Save the whining for somebody else.

“I discovered a secret early on in my
speaking business,” he says. “When a
corporation hired me to do a talk, they
didn’t want to hear ‘my story’ or ‘my
talk.’ They wanted information about
them that they could take, one minute
after I was done, and turn into money.
So, I decided early on that I would cus-
tomize every talk I gave. That has kept
me in business.”
That may be something of an
understatement.

As one of the most sought-after speakers on the United States, Gitomer delivers about 100 presentations each year, working for such high-profile clients as U.S. Foodservice, Coca-Cola, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Comcast Cable, Wells Fargo and BMW, among any others. He is now the author of several books, including The New York Times bestsellers, The Sales Bible, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Black Book of Connections and The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude. His suite of websites, including gitomer. com and trainone.com, get more than 100,000 hits each week, his weekly email newsletter claims 500,000 subscribers, and his nationally syndicated newspaper column is read by 4 million people each week. So, it was hardly a surprise when Gitomer was inducted into the National Speaker Association’s Speaker Hall of Fame in 2008.